Law and Justice / Human Services Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning. The Snohomish County Council Health and Community Services Committee will be called to order today's Tuesday, August 11th. It's 11 a.m. We're meeting in the Jackson boardroom and also remotely. Before we get into the agenda, I'm going to read a brief public comment script. We'll be taking public comment beginning in person and then remotely. In Zoom, you'll click the hand icon to raise your hand. If calling by phone, you'll press star nine to raise hand. When called upon, press star six to unmute. Each speaker will have three minutes to speak and please start your comment with your name and your city of residence. Now our clerks will please call roll.

Committee Chair Meade.

Here.

Vice Chair Lowe.

Present.

Committee Member Neering. Committee Member Dunn. Here. Committee Member Peterson.

Here.

Chair, there are four members present.

Great, thank you. And now we will move down to public comment. First, I'll invite anyone in person. I see no hands. Do we have anyone online? No hands are raised. Great, thank you. We'll close public comment. We'll get into our action items. First up is motion 26-284.

For the record, Cynthia Foley, Council Staff. Proposed motion 26-284 would authorize the transfer of expenditure authority between programs within Health Department Fund 125. The total amount to balance program expenditures is $1.8 million. Funds are being shifted from the administration and environmental health programs to the prevention program. The request is to move motion 26-284 to the GLS agenda for council consideration.

Great. Thank you. Do we have any questions or comments from council members or objections to consent? Seeing none, we'll move this to the consent agenda on August 19th. Next up is motion 26-290.

Snohomish County, through the Human Services Department, is seeking to enter into an interlocal agreement with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services to implement long-term care services through the WA Cares program. Snohomish County will support program awareness, ensure adequate provider capacity, and facilitate access to services for beneficiaries. The contract is for $2,045,196, the 2026-27 fiscal year. $1.2 million are allocated for beneficiary services. The request is to move motion 26-290 to the GLS agenda for council consideration.

Great. Thank you. Questions or comments from council members or objections to consent? Seeing none, we'll move this to August 19th's consent agenda. That's the end of our action items, but we do have a discussion item, our Snohomish County Emergency Management Annual Report for 2025. We have Lucia here. Welcome. Thank you.

Thank you. For the record, my name is Lucia Schmidt, and I am the director of the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management. So we submitted our 2025 annual report in alignment with county code requirements. And in the last couple of years, we've been submitting them as story maps. So I do want to encourage you to take the time to go look at the story map that is linked there. It tells a much more comprehensive picture then I will go through in this short presentation. So we started off when we were planning the annual report wanting to focus on the fact that 2025 was the 20th year of DEM as a county department. So there's a little trip down memory lane there. You can see here the French slew evacuation in 1990 where they were having to move thousands of heads of cattle. And then the lower one is undated, but it harkens back to kind of the civil defense times, I would guess 60s or 70s. And it was kind of a neat bookend, because one of the things we were dealing with this year is yet another evolution of emergency management, with massive changes at the federal level, FEMA changing its role in response and recovery. So one of the things that is highlighted in the report is not just the impacts that that had at the local level, but all of the advocacy we were doing at the federal level to make sure that our residents are still getting the support that they need when major disasters happen. So that advocacy was happening through the National Association of County Officials. It was also happening individually with our legislators. And then, as we'll cover later in the presentation, we got to feel the impacts directly with the December flood at the end of the year and see what those changes mean at a local level. It's not changing. There we go. Since COVID, essentially, Snohomish County DEM has been a leader in the state on providing emergency management training. This year, we continued to be a leader and provided 35% of the emergency management trainings in the state, which is interesting because we scaled back significantly the number of trainings we offered. So I think what we're seeing is statewide, there's a general scaling back. After COVID, there was a huge need for training because there was so much turnover. And now what we are focusing on is providing more advanced training opportunities, so fewer hours but more focused, looking at some of the more like tabletop exercises or EOC drills, looking at more in-depth and complex training as opposed to the massive training push that we had in past years. So while we're seeing a decrease in the number of trainings we're providing, That is an intentional decrease. We met the need then, and we're starting to see more people from out of the county attending our trainings than we wanted to justify, and so we're adjusting our focus as we go. But still impressive trainings with over 9,000 instruction hours provided through the trainings that we offered. So the December flooding... You know, at the peak flood levels, 56 square miles of the county were underwater. And we are still dealing with recovery. And if you were wondering why our annual report is getting presented on in August, it is because the first half of the year we were focused exclusively on ensuring that that recovery was getting out to our residents, or at least our communications staff were focused on that. Some of the impacts that we see from FEMA's changed posture is that they are doing less of a lift for communicating resources that are available out with residents. So they used to have disaster survivor assistance teams that would go out door to door in impacted areas and let them know about resources that could be available. And they would set up disaster recovery centers that they would run and just have open for people to come in. And what we saw this year this year is that that responsibility has shifted onto the local level. So it was a big pull for our communications staff in particular, but for recovery. But we saw some great outcomes of, you know, approximately $600,000 going directly to Snohomish County residents through the individual assistance program from FEMA, so direct reimbursement for their losses. And then over $2 million of loans have been approved by the Small Business Administration. Some of those are personal loans for home loss. Some of them are damage to businesses, and some of them are economic injury loss from business closures. And then our recovery of the public expenses is ongoing. That tends to come after the push to get assistance out to the survivors. So we are coordinating closely with county departments to recoup funding from our direct response expenses, as well as the recovery infrastructure repairs that are still ongoing.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

So I was able to do some tours with the governor of the flooded areas, four different areas, two in Skagit, two here in Snohomish County. I also did a tour with the Small Business Administration and some businesses that were affected by the flooding. One of my friends lost her home over in Spokane due to the fires just in the last couple weeks that I worked with in the legislature. Have you seen anything through the flooding event and some of these other events that we might need to change with county code to make some things easier? An example I'm going to give is my friend with the fire over in Spokane. They're saying they're probably not going to be able to rebuild in their neighborhood or that the permits are going to be very much delayed. I've heard a lot about delayed permits. So are there some changes that we can make as a county so when people go through the significant flooding or go through fires that they're building permits, rebuilding permits, and some of that other stuff can be expedited or moved to the front of the line? Or are there some changes that you've seen through this that we could possibly make? That's a great question.

So one of the things we did see in this flood was the benefit of mitigation efforts that happened way back in the 90s. So, you know, decades ago, the county made concerted efforts to get people, get residences out of the floodplain and zone those areas exclusively for agriculture. And so that is one of the reasons that we didn't have the massive number of homes impacted as some of our neighboring jurisdictions did is because we didn't have, is because our levees intentionally overtopped into agricultural areas where there were not residences. Now, the downside of that is what we, one of the challenges we were working through is there's not a lot of federal assistance to our farmers. So that's something that we're advocating for at both the state and federal level is how we can adjust programs to provide more assistance to our farmers after they're impacted by flooding because they really take one for the team and are kind of left short-handed so that's I don't have a concrete ask at the county policy level there but that's one of the things we're wrestling through the other thing we're seeing is I think back in the 90s we were there were these kind of massive like I'm struggling with the words because zoning is not my area of expertise, but there were like large neighborhoods of exposure that we could do buyouts for this entire neighborhood and mitigate the problem directly. Now what we're seeing more is kind of onesies, twosies, which is a lot higher of a burden at the county level in order for us to manage a buyout, manage a home elevation property. It takes an engineer that you know, a county-funded engineer, and it's just a lot of hands-on work. And so I think there is a question about what the county's role in those individual buyouts ought to be going forward.

And if I could just do a follow-up. I toured a farm in my district a few months ago, and I toured it maybe five years ago. I think they've lost about three or four acres of their farmland. Eventually, they're probably going to lose all their farm. And I just toured a place in a farm last week in Skagit County that I toured back in December. December, they lost maybe half an acre. Now they've lost five acres, and I toured it with all their county officials and other government officials. But now it's coming to the part where it's going to encroach on potentially their house and their farm. massive barn, are we doing anything pre-disaster of identifying some of these areas that are going to flood? And yeah, it's great that we can move them out to somewhere higher ground or something, although a lot of times we can't replace that because there just isn't. Are we able to work with the tribes and some of our other partners to see what mitigation they can do ahead of time so that they don't yeah, they might lose a few more acres of farmland, but they're not going to lose their home, they're not going to lose their barn. Are there some steps we can take with that?

Yeah, so I think, so the county is doing an integrated floodplain management initiative right now to start to look at how we can better connect, because what initiatives like that are, you know, it's part DEM, it's part surface water management, probably, you know, part PDS, and then Ecology gets involved anytime there's a river. And so the county's integrated floodplain management program is designed specifically to start to tackle some of those tough questions about what is going to be the county's stance and what can we do in places like that. Rivers move and rivers migrate. And in the early 1900s, we as a nation were trying to constrain rivers and keep them where we wanted them to go. And then that's what led to some of the really devastating floods that we saw in the 30s along the Mississippi Valley. And so I think what we have learned, or what we continue to learn, I can't say we have learned it, is that we really need to give rivers room to go. If it comes to a fight between infrastructure and a river, the river will always win. But I... So the state has a swift water current grant program right now that has become available because of this funding. If FEMA opens up hazard mitigation funding for this disaster, that's another place where we can try and leverage that funding to look at those properties on a case-by-case basis and see what the appropriate solution for those might be.

And I'm going to gently push back a little bit. It seems like our partners with the train line, they're able to protect the rail line fairly well and armor it fairly well. It seems like our public works has tools to armor roads and protect roads, major highways from the river taking out the highway and moving across. It doesn't seem like our homeowners and our farmers have the same type tools. I'm halfway okay with, but they need to have some tools. And so my gentle pushback is can we find some tools so that they can protect their home, protect their barn? Again, not all their property, but protecting, you know, like the barn that I toured was built in 1919. I mean, it's over 100 years old. It's been there for 100 years, and now the river's 30 feet from it. Again, this is Skagit County, but we have the same issues here in Snohomish County. So are there some tools we can give so that they can protect their livelihood, you know, their barn and their house?

Yeah, I think anytime we're – and this is really surface water management's expertise, so I recommend, you know, following up with them because I'm parroting a little bit what I hear from them. But anytime – we're talking about dealing with the river, then that becomes, you know, Department of Ecology is involved with their permitting requirements. And the railroad is fortunate that they predate all of those laws so that they don't really apply to the railroad. But we are not immune to them. But we do have, I mean, this is a question that we are looking at right now as we speak in the integrated floodplain management space. the steering committee was asked, was given a policy paper on it this morning. So it is an area that we are actively wrestling with, is how can we as a county support people along the floodplains? How can we balance the resources required with the resources available in a way that is protecting those residents?

And that's all I'm asking for. Thank you.

Can I build on that real quick? Yeah. Just quickly. I concur with some of the thoughts around concern for the agricultural community, because that was one of the biggest feedback. Some of the biggest feedback I heard was that they weren't eligible for some of those federal programs, especially around crop loss, because it was contaminated water. So they couldn't even sell, even if something were to grow, it was ineligible. So that might be good for some of our federal delegations to hear and make it one of our Legislative priorities for that work.

Absolutely. We've met with Both of our senators offices and our representatives offices to share that that message and we're hoping to keep advocating on it The way the USDA programs are structured just doesn't work for our the kind of farming we have here in Western, Washington So we're hopeful that we can make changes and those disaster programs so they benefit our farmers. I Anything else in the flooding? Okay. So the auxiliary communication services, these are our radio volunteers. I want to highlight what a great investment this is on behalf of the county. We fund three-quarters of a person, and he coordinates and brings in almost two FTE worth of volunteer hours. The estimated cost savings there of over $180,000 worth of labor is assuming FEMA's base rate labor rates. But what we're dealing with is engineers and retired technicians. And so it would be a much higher rate if we were paying them based on their experience. But they come in and they manage our radio caches. They help deploy our equipment out during disasters. They help us tackle complex problems and maintain our radio infrastructure. So just really a great asset for the county, and they will be what helps knit our communications together whenever the big one happens. And again, that radio officer, it's Three quarters of a position, and starting in 26, that is a general funded position, and I just want to thank you so much for making that investment and allowing us to keep this resource available for the county. Mitigation and planning. So these are, we had a couple big milestones that were a long time coming. The culmination of months, if not years, worth of work. We published the first county-wide report community wildfire protection plan, which identifies strategies for how we as a county can reduce our risk to wildfires. And we finalized our hazard mitigation plan, finalized it in 2025, only just got the FEMA approval of it. But so the good news is that our hazard mitigation plan is now good. We are covered by FEMA until the end of July, until late July 2031. So that's fantastic. And then we are now working with partners to develop supporting annexes for both. So for the community wildfire protection plan, what that looks like is specific fuel management strategies based off of community risk, but also looking more in-depth at evacuation planning and considerations like that by region of the county. For the mitigation plan, that looks like helping our ILA partners develop their city-specific annexes, or in the case of We're actually working with the Coordinated Dyking Council to see if we can help some of our dyking districts develop better mitigation plans, which might help address Councilmember Low's question as well. And then we also did some operational planning, a lot of operational planning work, which hasn't quite cumulated, though we're going to start to see those plans getting finalized in 2026. So, working on the update of the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, working on the annexes both for the individual jurisdictions in our ILA's as well as for the various functional areas that are necessary in a disaster. And so those are starting to wrap up right now and we'll start getting a flurry of final documents that you'll get to hear about in next year's annual report. And then we just continue to provide support to the county's 911 system. to ensure that addresses and roads and new neighborhoods that are in the 911 dispatching system align with and keep up with the pace of development in the county. So you can see that we added almost 5,000 new addresses to that dispatching system and over 1,200 new roads. And so for each of those, we'll do like as a new development goes up, we'll do a drone flight to map the new neighborhood and to overlay the addresses on where the buildings actually are so that when our EMS, when our firefighters or police get dispatched, they have very high confidence, very high confidence that they are going to the right address and that their mapping will take them to the correct place. And then we have those drone missions to support 911 day-to-day, but then we can also deploy them out during the flooding. So they were able to provide us real-time visibility on some of our more impacted areas and help us see what might be on the other side of the floodwaters that we couldn't access by vehicle. Okay. And then the last area that I wanted to cover is public information and outreach. We work year round to try and spread information to the community about where they can go for information about disasters. Largely our public safety hub, which I'll say for anyone listening online right now, the Snohomish County Public Safety Hub is the one stop shop anytime there is a disaster. That's where we'll post information. about protective measures, about actions that they can take. So during the flooding, there were four active evacuations over the course of the flooding. All of that information was on the Public Safety Hub, as well as information about how to access recovery resources. And so you can see over the course of the year, we saw an increase in both people who follow our Facebook page as well as people who subscribe to Snohomish County alerts, which is a way to get us to directly message folks. It's a way that residents can tie, you know, both their work and their home addresses to their phone or maybe their child's daycare address to their phone so they'd get alerts if something was impacting any of the places where they or their loved ones might be located. And then what we saw during the floods is it paid off and we had over 2.4 million views of DEM's Facebook page and 175,000 views of the Public Safety Hub over just a few short weeks. So we're getting the message out and people are listening. And you can see that there is, we're pushing less heavily on, it says Twitter, but X right now. We have found that to be a less useful mechanism for getting information out with the changes, and I can't speak to any more detail on that, so hopefully there are no questions. And that is all that we have on the annual report. Happy to take other questions, but also encourage you to spend some time with the story map.

Awesome. Thank you for putting so much time into the presentation. I know we asked questions halfway through, but do we have additional questions from council members before we let Lucia go? All right. Well, thank you very much for being here. Thanks for the presentation. That brings us to the end of our agenda for today, so council will be adjourned. Thank you.